An interim executive team is assigned.
The gavel hits the table.
And I'm not the CEO anymore.
The business coach pulls me aside ... he wants to talk.
We go into my office.
He closes the door behind us.
"How you doing?" he says.
...sigh ... "It is what it is, I am where I am. What do I do now?"
"That's the good news," he says, "you get your dream job."
He starts telling me that in business coach training they use the story of Steve Jobs at Apple.
First, Steve eats Wozniak for breakfast.
This is a hardball game and Steve needed to warm up.
Then Steve grows the company like a genius 'cuz he gets the gadget and makes it glow,
and is smart enough to do the rest adequately.
Time goes on. Steve gets good at a variety of things, and the company's running just fine, thank you very much.
But after a while Steve's runnin' his butt off and not really doing any one thing well,
not even the stuff he's good .... no, genius at. The company starts to falter.
So they kick Jobs out and hired Scully, a guy that knew how to make a money machine.
Scully was even good at managing marketing departments that understood branding and product differentiation and stuff.
But he didn't know how to make the juice appear in the gadget.
Apple began to lapse into a semi coma of self satisfaction and denial.
Meanwhile, Jobs went back to the begining at Next and failed, but learned a lot in the process.
Then, the hidden in the background, but ever so powerful, owners reached in and placed Jobs back in charge,
and with his new found appreciation of how hard it is to administer and operate a company,
he started doing what he was good at (product and marketing) and got good money machine guys turn the crank.
Baddabing, the iPod.
Steve couldn't have done it from the beginning,
he needed to learn the lessons of getting kicked out.
And he's one in a billion, anyway.
He went on to say that the successful company after founder's trap,
is the one that balances a visionary founder with a money-machine-maker CEO. Success is when the visionary provides the CEO with solid intellegence and golden opportunities; where the founder lives by the budget, and where the CEO knows how to budget the money and forbearance needed to solve the problems that capitalizing on opportunity inevitable bring.
I began to feel a weight lifting off my shoulders.
"But wait," says I, "did you tell me what my dream job was in there?"
"No." he shakes his head, "You have to tell me what your dream job is."
Then he points to the pad and paper.
"Write it down."
I give him a quizzical look.
"Now."